Practice to Deceive

by David Housewright

  I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was looking for. But I saw plenty, starting with a silver ’73 Cadillac that had seen way better days—the rocker panels were rusted, and the rear passenger taillight was missing. The Caddy stopped in front of Levering’s door. A young black man slid out from behind the wheel, glanced up at the house, then gave his horn two long blasts. He was wearing an Oakland Raiders warm-up jacket—the preferred attire of hoodlums everywhere. He sounded his horn a few more times. A moment later, the front door opened, and Emily skipped out. The girl’s mother was behind her. She shouted something, but the daughter ignored her. The young man settled inside the car, slamming his door. Emily was soon sitting next to him and the car sped away. Amanda watched from the front stoop as the car turned left and sped out of sight, cradling her head with both hands as she had when the cops brought her daughter home. She went back into her house and I wrote down the license plate of the kid’s Caddy on a notepad I carry, asking myself the same question Freddie had asked earlier: “You got a problem with a black man and a white woman bein’ together?”

  AT FOUR-THIRTY by my watch, a blue van with TWIN CITY FLORIST painted in gold on both sides came to a stop in front of the Fields’ residence. A young man carrying an oblong box made his way to the door and rang the bell. Amanda answered and smiled. The delivery man handed her the package and left without waiting for a tip. Amanda went inside, shutting the door behind her. A few minutes later she emerged from the back door, carrying the box over her shoulder with both hands.

  She walked purposefully to the garbage can next to the garage and kicked the lid off with her foot. Then she smashed the box onto the rim of the can. Over and over again she brought the box down hard, like it was something she was trying to kill; white rose petals and bits of green stem flew around her. She kept swinging the box until it broke in two, and then she threw both halves into the can. She collapsed to her knees, holding the rim. Watching through the binoculars, I saw her chest heave and her shoulders shake. I felt about as big as a period at the end of a sentence.

  I DIDN’T LEAVE. The sadist in me wanted to see what would happen when Levering rolled up. But ten minutes after Amanda staggered back into her house, she was on the move again, with a fresh coat of lipstick and a determined look on her face. She drove a dark-green Pontiac Grand Am. I gave her a half-block head start.

  I wondered if she intended to confront Levering in his lair, but instead of driving west to Minneapolis, she went south, catching I-494 and staying with it until she was in Bloomington. I followed her as she took an exit near the Mall of America. Was she going shopping? No. She turned off, drove past a hotel that served both the mall and the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, pulled into the driveway of a small office complex. The words ADOLPH POINT were carved into a monument at the mouth of the driveway. Amanda found an empty space in the first row of the parking lot and hurried inside the building. I watched from the back row.

  Fifteen minutes later she emerged from the office building—with a man. The man had his arm draped over her shoulder. She leaned into him as they walked; he kept looking around as if he was afraid of being noticed. I suspected he wasn’t Amanda’s big brother.

  That suspicion was soon confirmed. After giving her a hug and helping Amanda into her car, he moved quickly to his own, a Buick Regal. The two cars left together. They didn’t go far. They both pulled into the hotel’s parking lot. Amanda and her companion were walking arm in arm when they went through the hotel’s front doors.

  I actually said aloud, “Have a good time, Amanda.” But that didn’t make me feel any better about what I had done to her.

  “ARE YOU FAMILIAR with Minnesota’s stalking laws?” Cynthia asked from my kitchen table.

  “Vaguely,” I answered.

  “I’ll get copies,” she volunteered. “We’ll review them tomorrow. Carefully.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  Cynthia shook her head. No, not her.

  I stirred my beef Stroganoff mixture while the egg noodles boiled. Cynthia sat at the table, paging through the latest edition of The Sporting News. I watched her from the stove. She shook her head over an article. Something about Albert Belle’s contract.

  I wondered if Cynthia knew she was beautiful. Certainly her clothes were beautiful; her makeup, her poise, her manners, her speech—she had paid enough for them. But when she looked in the mirror each day, did she see the pure physical beauty that existed beneath all that, or had the years on the street, the years spent dancing naked before leering imbeciles, stripped away her ability to judge her own value?

  I asked her, “Do you know you’re beautiful?”

  Cynthia fidgeted in her chair. “Where did that come from?”

  “Just answer the question, Counselor: Do you know that you’re beautiful?”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Objection, hearsay. The court requires the witness to answer according to her own knowledge.”

  “Taylor, what are you doing?”

  “Just answer the question, please. Do you know that you are beautiful?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Do you know—”

  “Yes, I suppose I do. Lately I’ve come to think I’m beautiful. Is that all right?”

  “Yes, it is. That’s good. I’m glad.”

  Cynthia set my magazine aside—she didn’t like sports, anyway. She regarded me carefully, watching as I drained the noodles in a colander.

  “I’m still angry,” she announced.

  “I know,” I said.

  I poured the noodles into a glass bowl, then poured the Stroganoff mixture over the top and tossed. People who have eaten what I set in front of them will tell you I’m a helluva cook. Don’t you believe it. A good cook can improvise, can create from scratch. Me? Without my recipe books I couldn’t scramble eggs. Don’t tell my mom.

  Cynthia helped herself to a plate of the Stroganoff, ate a forkful, and promptly requested ketchup. Talk about angry.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, not referring to the food.

  “I think what you are doing is horrid. What you did to that poor woman …”

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said in self-defense. “But not the rest.”

  “Sometimes I don’t understand you. I would never have guessed that you would … stalk … a man.”

  I frowned.

  “That’s the correct word,” Cynthia insisted. “That’s what you’re doing. And it’s terrible.”

  “Is it?”

  “You’re telling me you don’t agree?”

  “Like I said, I’m sorry about Amanda but not the rest. You see, I know something about Levering’s life right now. I know how his stomach churns and his head throbs. I know how he fears every phone call and jumps at every knock on his door. I know how he’s unable to eat, unable to sleep at night; how he’s reluctant to rise in the morning. I know all this and the thought of it makes me happy.”

  “What kind of man are you?”

  “The kind of man you call when you want to get two hundred and eighty-seven thousand dollars from a thief.”

  SEVEN

  THE PHONE CAUGHT me on the way out. Levering Field was on the other end. He was angry. I know because he told me so. And because his voice crackled like the electric sounds of a welder’s torch.

  “Enough!” he yelled. “I have had enough!”

  “Enough of what?” I answered innocently, aware that he was probably recording the conversation.

  “You know fucking well,” Levering insisted.

  “Should we be talking? Your lawyer served me with a restraining order yesterday that said I’m not supposed to have any contact with you.”

  “You listen to me, you little prick—”

  “Hey, hey, hey! Be civil or I’m going to hang up.”

  “You stay away from me and my family.”

  “I swear t
o God, Mr. Field, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never gone near you, and I didn’t even know you had a family.”

  “You liar!”

  “Listen, if things are not going well for you, don’t blame me. Blame your bad karma”—it was probably the first time I’ve ever used that word. “Nasty things happen to nasty people.”

  “Once more, Taylor. One more time, goddamn it—”

  “Frankly, Ring, I’m disappointed,” I told him. “I just never thought a man could have as much money as you do and not be smart. As for your threats, you’re doing it all wrong, man. You want to scare someone, you have to be scary. Tell you what. Rent Kiss of Death at the video store—the original black and white, not the remake—and pay close attention to Richard Widmark’s performance. Chilling …”

  “You sonuvabitch!”

  “See, what he’d do is he’d giggle. There’s this great scene where he ties a crippled woman to a wheelchair and throws her down a flight of stairs; giggles all the way through it.…”

  “Fuck you!”

  “You should try that. Giggling, I mean. Worked for Widmark, made him a star. Maybe it’ll work for you. It has to be better than the patter you have going now—”

  Levering slammed the phone down, nearly puncturing my ear drum.

  I stared at the now dead receiver, outraged. “Some people have no telephone manners.”

  Since I had the phone in my hand, I dialed my friend in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department again. Yes, he’d received the twenty-five bucks I sent him; was there anything else he could do for me?

  “Now that you’ve mentioned it, could you run a plate off a silver ’73 Caddy for me? Usual fee?”

  Five minutes later I learned that the Caddy belonged to a Kareem Olds, 19, who lived in the lower apartment of a duplex on Collins Street in St. Paul. “That’s Railroad Island,” said the deputy, who was familar with the 150-year-old, decidedly blue-collar neighborhood on the east side of St. Paul, surrounded, like a moat, by railroad tracks. For another twenty-five, the deputy was happy to run Olds’s vitals through the NCIC. No wants, no warrants, no arrests, no convictions.

  I PARKED ON Selby Avenue in St. Paul, not far from the hotel where F. Scott Fitzgerald used to hang out and a bar where August Wilson wrote some of his plays. It’s the area the real estate types call Cathedral Hill, named after the magnificent church that looms above downtown St. Paul—the biggest, grandest church in the Midwest, some say. It was designed by the French architect Masqueray and has a definite Notre Dame feel to it.

  However, the nickname changes, along with the property values, just a few blocks west as you pass Western and head toward Dale. The cops call this neighborhood simply “the Hill.” To the media it’s known as “Crack Street.”

  I had spent a lot of time on the Hill, mostly trying to take it back from the dealers who ply their trade there. It was a losing battle. It did not matter that we walked day and night patrols throughout the area or that neighbors would walk with us, pointing out the stash pads and crack houses, cheering when we hit them, taking personal pride in our soaring arrest rates. Cocaine distribution is an example of a free-market economy in its purest form, and as long as people want to buy, someone will sell. That’s why I begged my superiors to ignore the dealers for a time and instead concentrate on the lily-white suburbanites who cruised the Hill in their Honda Civics and Ford Tauruses—destroy the demand and let’s see what happens, I pleaded. Unfortunately, my experiment was never attempted. Of course, punching out a prosecuting attorney didn’t help my argument much.

  I had been undercover for seven months, setting up busts, pretending to be all kinds of people. For some reason one suspect got antsy and decided to move. He’d loaded all of his goods into a large suitcase: two kilograms of powder, thirteen pounds of crack—we’re talking sixty thousand hits—a half dozen nickel bags of grass, fifty-eight thousand dollars in cash, and a Colt Python and holster. Then he threw a going-away party for himself. We crashed the door as he and his friends were toasting themselves with champagne, the suitcase lying open on the living room floor. Only the prosecutor wouldn’t file. He’d said there was a chance the constructive possession rules would have resulted in a dismissal—I couldn’t prove which suspect actually owned the suitcase.

  The prosecutors are always doing that, refusing to file charges unless they have a lock. Over sixty percent of all drug cases are dismissed before charges are brought. Sure, of the forty percent that are actually filed, nearly all result in convictions, but that only proves my point: Most prosecutors simply will not risk screwing up their conviction rates, an admittedly important part of their performance-review process.

  So I hit him. Call it anger, frustration, stupidity: I hammered his collar bone, cracking it, and walked away. For a long time I thought I had lost my job along with my temper. Hell, he might even have filed charges. He certainly had had the right. Instead, I was transferred to Homicide. I was ecstatic. Laura was not. The word “homicide” conjured frightening images to her. As it turned out, after Narcotics, Homicide proved positively restful.

  FROM WHERE I was parked, I could see the comings and goings of all the residents of Crystalin Wolters’s apartment building, located at the high end of Selby, close to the Cathedral. I had only a cursory description of Crystalin. But she drove a Porsche, and there was only one in the lot. I watched that, using the small, collapsible 3X binoculars I sometimes carry in my jacket pocket.

  At about eight-thirty a young woman with Crystalin’s hair color exited the building’s glass doors and walked purposefully to the Porsche, glancing at her watch as she went. Sixty seconds later she was on Selby, heading west. I followed. She turned left, then right, then left, then right again. We were on Fort Road now, heading toward the airport.

  Fort Road used to be called West Seventh Street. As West Seventh Street it had as dreary a reputation as Block E in Minneapolis. But the St. Paul City Council did not have the same resources as the City of Lakes, so instead of taking a wrecking ball to it, they simply changed its name, hoping that would solve everything.

  And politicians wonder why so few of us bother to vote.

  Crystalin pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant that advertised eggs, ham, hash browns, toast, and coffee for $3.99. I wondered if she was meeting Levering for a cheap breakfast. But she wasn’t. She sat alone in a booth, ordering quickly, not waiting for anyone. I was lucky again because the place was jammed with customers. Crystalin thought nothing of it when I asked if I could share her booth.

  She was a buxom, green-eyed blond, bursting with energy and rosy-cheeked health. She looked like she’d come straight from the factory—no nicks or scratches. She had a little voice; when it dropped down at the end of her sentences you sometimes lost it completely. Her smile came quickly and stayed long.

  We both ordered the special. While we ate, she asked what I did for a living.

  “Public relations,” I lied. “How about you?”

  “I’m a student at Macalester College.”

  “Really, what’s your major?”

  “I haven’t decided, yet.”

  “Hmm.”

  Then we praised the glorious spring weather and lamented that no way it was going to last; the TV meteorologists were already gleefully predicting the impending arrival of several storm fronts. That was about as deep as our conversation got. Still, Crystalin seemed quite articulate, which did not surprise me at all. Most men—and women, too—they see an attractive woman, they naturally assume she’s as dumb as Sheetrock. Especially if the woman’s young and blond to boot. Not me. With few exceptions, the attractive women I’ve known over the years were all quite intelligent. Or was that the other way around?

  In any case, Crystalin was pleasant enough, with a touch of little-girl shyness that was rather endearing—not at all the personality you’d expect from a gold digger, from an adulteress. The way she played with her golden hair while she spoke reminded me of a woman I pursued in co
llege named Susan—one of those that got away. Because of Susan I actually regretted what I did to Crystalin. Just as she drove her car from the parking lot, I used the cell phone to call the St. Paul Police Department, dialing the direct line—911 is taped and the reels are stored forever.

  “Someone just stole my girlfriend’s Porsche,” I told the officer. “Me? My name is Levering Field. LEVERING …”

  KBEM’s NEWS GUY warned us that we had already reached the day’s high, that temperatures were now falling like a melon off the top of the IDS Tower. Heavy snow was predicted by nightfall. Like nearly everyone else in the Twin Cities, I was not surprised by the report, but I cursed it just the same.

  I drove to my office, brewed a pot of coffee, sat behind my desk and realized I had nothing to do. So I decided to visit Dragons, my dojo, for a workout. I don’t study a particular art, but rather a combination of judo, karate, and aikido. I’m not interested in earning a belt, although they tell me I could if I applied myself. Nor am I one of those diehards who believes in the spirituality of hand-to-hand combat. I’m interested solely in survival. I barely passed the minimum height requirement for a police officer—probably wouldn’t have if the doctor hadn’t laughed at all my jokes—and in my business if you don’t have size, you better have skills because screaming “Quit it, you big meannie!” isn’t going to do it.

  I’ve been taking instruction for nearly fifteen years. True, in a gym anyone above my weight class would probably kick my ass. But on the street, without a referee, without a nice, soft mat to fall on, size and strength don’t matter nearly as much as what you’re willing to do. And given the proper motivation, I’m willing to do anything.

  My Gi was in a locker at Dragons with my other equipment, so I grabbed my jacket and walked out the door, locking it behind me. I walked down Sixth Street and across Hennepin to where a bearded man in ragged clothes carried a baby on his shoulder and yelled, “Minneapolis, you should be ashamed of yourself!” at whoever came within shouting distance. He never made it clear just why Minneapolis should be ashamed, and no one bothered to ask. Instead, we marched past him, trying to avoid eye contact, hoping he would go away. On the same corner a popcorn vendor shook his head. He wanted the man to go away, too. The guy was killing business.